MPM – Operation: Eat All the Food, Week 6

This is it! The final week of Operation: Eat All the Food. I’ll post a wrap up and some “after” pictures next week. If you participated, I want to hear how you did!

I did pretty well last week. I did eat out once but that was because I got pink eye and couldn’t go infecting everyone at bible study so I ordered Chinese. And then it took me 5 days to eat it all. 5 day-old sesame chicken is not advised people. Take my word for it. I thought I was going to have to eat out on Thursday but dinner was provided at my meeting and it included some of the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten. I usually don’t like fried boneless chicken breasts because they get dried out, but this was moist and delicious. I could write a whole blog post about that piece of chicken; it was that good.

This weekend I took the opportunity to clean out my fridge, freezer, and pantry. By clean out I mean toss old food and scrub things down. My fridge is now nice and clean and smelling like Clorox wipes. 🙂 I tossed more than what I would like to have, but it made a huge difference and I feel like I finally made some progress. I also reorganized my pantry and was able to get to something in the back corner without knocking everything else over.

Here is what I was able to use up completely this week:

mozzarella cheese

jarred tomato sauce

ground beef

most of a box of spaghetti

eggs

box of brownie/cookie mix

all my leftovers

Doesn’t look so great but I did make a huge dent in using up:

frozen spinach

quinoa

lunch meat

sliced cheese

large can of crushed tomatoes

bread

There are still a lot of frozen vegetables in my freezer, but I have plans for some of them plus that’s not something I really fear going bad or never getting used. I’ll get to them eventually. I also did some MAJOR baking yesterday, something that I haven’t done in quite a while as The Carpenter was kind enough to point out. 🙂 I made some muffins, banana-chocolate chip bread from a mix I had, and something for an upcoming blog post. That took care of all my eggs as well put a dent in my flour and butter collection.

Random confession: I love spinach, but frozen spinach scares me. Every recipe I see that uses frozen spinach requires you to like drain it or squeeze it or something like that and it intimidates me–what if I don’t squeeze it right and there’s too much water and it ruins the dish!? Ack, so much anxiety!!

lol It’s really not that big of deal. I like to thaw mine out in a colander under running, cool water. Then I put it all in a kitchen towel that I don’t mind getting stained green, or a lot of paper towels and squeeze it out. You’ll be able to tell when you’ve got most of the water out – the spinach will have shrunk up and clumped together and it will look pretty dry.

Unless you’re putting it into some sort of cream sauce, I wouldn’t worry about making sure you get absolutely all the water out (just most of it). A little water never hurt anyone. 🙂